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alfgifu's avatar

One incredibly unhealthy dynamic in the current pay structure of core government departments is that pay is fixed in grade bands and there is very little flexibility to recognise expertise or experience if people are not promoted - which means that there is little incentive for people to settle into roles and really come to master a subject.

Then, due to wage pressure, it's much cheaper to get bright but very new people in to tackle complex problems. The fast stream is all very well, but fast streamers are incredibly poorly equipped for many of the issues that they get pointed at - and newly appointed ex-fast-streamers often end up reinventing the wheel, or flailing. One big aspect of this is that the spending teams at HMT who are responsible for negotiating settlements across government are largely very young and untested. It's great to give people a chance to get experience and to bring in new perspectives - but without institutional memory you get the same mistakes over and over and over again.

And, as you say, salaries for back office staff are not competitive with equivalents in the private sector, which benefits those who can afford it (I took a 20% pay cut in 2018 to move into a Grade 7 role in the civil service; I was coming off maternity leave with two young children but was lucky enough to have the financial security to take the hit in exchange for a job I believed in).

Further anecdotal reflection - I know multiple people who left the civil service following the back-to-the-office debacle, both because of the lack of flexibility and because the way it played out felt so aggressive and lost a lot of trust (particularly the implications that people wfh were not working, and the way ministers and senior leadership failed to defend civil servants who had just poured their all into coordinating the covid response, at huge cost to their mental and physical health and their families' wellbeing).

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Centrist Mum's avatar

For junior doctors you could help retention a lot via relatively small changes to make the contract less demanding. Easiest would be paying for courses when you pay for them rather than when you do the course months later. Could also look at rotating over shorter distances - with a few exceptions (West Cornwall Hospital is just a long way away from the nearest teaching hospital) there isn't really a reason to make people commute over such large distances, also longer rotations (or the same length but with consecutive rotations in the same hospital so they stay longer), a small amount of time per week of paid admin time.

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